When We Were the Kennedys (20 page)

And so: “
I
did, Sister.” Linda Cote, sixth grade, possessor of enviably long blond hair and, apparently, a sizable death wish.

“Why were you laughing?”

“No reason, Sister.”

“People don't laugh for no reason.”

“Well, it sounded kind of funny when your voice cracked.”

As Carolyn Keene would have it:
They froze in horror!

“And you thought that was funny?”

“Yes, Sister.” No choice here. She has to tell the truth.

“Is that so? Then perhaps you would do us all the great favor of singing these lines yourself.”

Cue the organ, Sister Mary of Jesus (kindly; mustachioed; outranked) staring helplessly at the sheet music. A brief intro, slow and funereal. Then Linda sings four bars like a springtime sun, her voice warm and pure and touched by a faint, angelic vibrato.
Tantum ergo Sacramentum, Veneremur chernui.
 . . .

Uh-oh.

“Well, students? Was that funny? Linda, did you hear anybody laughing while you sang?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, Sister.”

Wherever Sister Louise might have been going with this, she appears to have lost her way. Perhaps she's been blind-sided by the eerie joy of a young girl's clarity of tone, or by the revelation that she, Sister Louise, has created a thing of beauty out of a mixed crew of schoolgirls who came to her with zero musical chops and wound up singing like the Cherubim and Seraphim. She teaches school because she has to; she directs the choir because she loves to. Her choir—our choir—is
good.
We've been told, by Sister herself, that we channel the sweetness of heaven.

“All right, then,” she says, glaring briefly at Linda, then at Sister Mary of Jesus, pretending she's nailed down her murky point. “Now. Everyone. From the first measure.” She lifts her hands, thumbs and index fingers lightly touching. “And remember, please: Music is prayer.”

We're rehearsing for the season's High Masses, Latin prayers like
O Salutaris
and
Panis Angelicus
and
Ave Maria
and varying arrangements of the
Tantum Ergo.
Though Sister Louise tosses Pope John a few crumbs like “Holy God We Praise Thy Name,” we remain among the last congregants in the country to succumb to the retooled protocols of Vatican II. It seems that every new thing in America comes late to our town: rock-and-roll, collective bargaining, vinyl siding, the English-language Mass.

But the news of the president reaches us fast, the same way it reaches everyone: Someone hears the radio, turns on the TV, calls everyone she knows. I'm lined up with the rest of the fifth-graders in the side lot after recess, waiting to return to our steam-heated classroom. Directly across the street—up there, top floor, behind the white sheers on the front-room windows—Denise's mother gapes at the unfolding news. Perhaps she rushes to the window, looking for Denise and me, the two of us together in line as always, the sky over our heads exceptionally high and bright and cold. We've been on the girls' side, jumping rope on bare pavement, the boys corralled on the boys' side, strangling each other or hurling insults or hacking each other with sticks. No snow to speak of yet and we're only six days from Thanksgiving. I entertain myself by imagining everybody standing here next week, their teeth rattling in the first snow, while I'm in Our Nation's Capital, walking into the White House on the arm of my uncle.

Just beyond the flat rooftop of Denise's block, you can see the windows of our parlor, where Mum, too, drops to a seat in front of the TV and places her hand on her heart.

All at once, Sister Bernadette bursts from the building, her small eyes rodent-red with turmoil. “Children,” she begins. “A terrible thing has happened.” Her doughy wrists jut from her cuffs and she hugs herself. She's forgotten her coat, a tiered woolen monstrosity that weighs thirty pounds. Her mouth opens to the cold.

Oh, no.

Waiting in the crackled November sunshine, I can think of only one Terrible Thing. My body feels like a river in the act of freezing.

On the other side of the building, the third-graders in line after their own recess, Sister Louise whispers something to Sister Mary of Jesus, who blanches while Sister Louise faces the line and says, “Children, I have very bad news.” Betty waits, docile and unmoved; everything about school is bad news to her. But Cathy, who writes letters to Mum when she's supposed to be practicing her times-threes or teaching Betty how to knit, jumps to the same numbing conclusion: Mum died.

But it's not Mum.

“Who?” I whisper to Denise. “Who did she say?”

First I don't hear, then I do. It's President Kennedy, Mum's other man. He has been shot.

“The president's dead, the president's dead!” shouts a kid in line, one of the histrionic boys. “There's gonna be a war!”

Who cares? Cathy and I are possibly the only two citizens of the United States of America who receive the heart-jangling, era-shaping news of twelve-thirty
P.M.
, Central Standard Time, November 22, 1963, with a gulping wallop of relief.

Mum is home, making a salmon loaf for our no-meat Friday supper, alive alive alive.

 

New word:
assassination.

Such a clamor, coast to coast, strangers from Detroit and Los Angeles and Hartford and New York sobbing into fuzzy microphones to tell the newsmen
I can't believe it, oh dear God, I can't believe it, how can we go on?
Mexico, too, mourns hard, especially the mothers, and most especially the Catholic mothers, who love beautiful Catholic Jackie even more than handsome Catholic Jack. Our First Lady wears boxy jackets with three-quarter sleeves. She sculpts her hair into shiny pageboys. She waltzes like a breeze-ruffled lilac. She rides brawny, upper-crust horses. Slim and graceful and humbly rich, she makes our mothers, in their cakelike hats from the fifties with fake flowers and crinkly veils, look suddenly dowdy and wanting. Jackie speaks “Paris” French, not the country French of our Franco neighbors. Her very name,
Jacqueline
Bouvier,
honeyed and Continental, soaks our mothers with yearning.

Mum's 1963 Easter hat looked a lot like her 1962 Easter hat, but she'd come home from Doris's Dress Shop calling it a pillbox because that's what Jackie wore. “I like how it covers the head,” she said, “but not the hair.” This is what somebody on TV had said. Dad thought it a “desperate-handsome rig” for its trim of silk flowers. A month after that, she wore it to Dad's funeral.

And now Jackie, too, has suffered the unthinkable, her husband gone
like that.

Jackie in her bloody pink suit.

Jackie with her children tucked close.

Jackie taking her brother-in-law Bobby's hand.

Jackie with her finishing-school posture, her high-born cheekbones, her bravery and poise.

Jackie bearing up.

In a different year Mum might have done like the other mothers, who are meeting at grocery counters to buy the Friday fish and break into tears. Instead, Mum stays home, watching the televised spectacle with a ferocious, private empathy. She, too, knows about bearing up. She'd followed her own husband's casket out of a church fogged with incense, her own mild brown eyes wounded and dry, her own coat buttoned up just so, as if to show everyone—even Jackie, had she been watching—how these things were done. She had her own little Caroline—three of them; her own Bobby; her own bravery and poise.

 

Our TV, like everyone's, stays on for three solid days while shock follows shock:

Walter Cronkite, our trustworthy newsman, breaking down on air.

Jackie getting off the plane, twenty-four hours since bang-shock-bang, still wearing the trim pink suit, its bodice defaced with blood and brain.

Another murder, on live TV, a shady character named Jack Ruby gunning down the president's killer as he's led from a holding room by detectives wearing fedoras like Father Bob's.

Mum, who's refused us a Barbie for her “vulgar” proportions, lets us watch all this. She had shielded us from much of Dad's own Catholic goodbye, but we watch every second of the gruesome coverage, every second of the national wake, the national funeral, the national burial. Protecting us now from the death of a husband and father would be pretty much a locking-the-barn-door affair. The set stays on; Mum keeps vigil with Jackie, narrating the First Widow's first hours: the shell-shocked wife, the heartsick mother, the chin-up architect of the national funeral.

“Oh, girls. Look at that suit. That's blood.”

“See that, girls? See how she's staring at nothing? She's thinking of the children now.”

“She hasn't even changed her clothes. That's shock, girls.”

“Mother of Mary, how is she ever going to tell them?”

“There she is, girls, God love her soul. Even in shock, how beautiful.”

On and on, for three days.

“Look, girls, there's Bobby.” The president's younger brother. His favorite. Caroline's uncle. “He'll be the man of the house now.” She speaks with the quiet passion of an insider, her every observation delivered with a weary, unwanted authority.

“Bobby won't leave her side,” she goes on, mopping her eyes. “Thank God she has him.”

We watch it all: The president's casket with its crisp, distressing flag. Weeping citizens filing past in their cloth coats and fogged-up eyeglasses and homely shoes. Jackie and Caroline kneeling to kiss the casket.

Had we done that? Kissed Dad's casket?

Monday brings the president's funeral and burial, school closed, a national day of mourning. On Tuesday we'll leave for Baltimore and Our Nation's Capital, which is steeped in mourning; we'll miss school altogether this week, more time than we got for Dad.

“Look, girls, she's put her veil down now. She doesn't want people to see her face.” The way she says it—
people
—makes me realize: other people. Not us. Because we know what's under there.

“Oh, those dear children. Little Caroline and John-John.”

Our counterparts. I drink them in.

“She chose Arlington because the president was a war hero, girls. That's important—PT-109. Remember that.”

We watch and watch: procession after procession, quiet but for the sound of horses' hooves and the heartbeat percussion of muffled drums.

New word:
caisson.
I toy with a memory of my making: Dad's trip to the cemetery, led by a riderless horse like Black Jack prancing and shying behind a six-white-horse-drawn caisson. I invent Dad's procession, Dad's twenty-one-gun salute, Dad's strangers from Detroit and Los Angeles and Hartford and New York keening into the cameras. Dad's widow, a veil covering the thing she won't let people see.

New word:
cortège.
Mum barely moves from the brocaded footstool, the closest seat to the TV. We watch the funeral cortège, stirred by the pomp and ceremony, the slither of low black cars, the sea of crosses at Arlington National Cemetery, and Black Jack with his polished hooves and nothing in his saddle but a pair of boots set backwards into the stirrups.

Symbolic, Anne says. The leader shall not ride again.

She sits on the couch with us, gathering us one-two-three. Mum gazes into the snowy light of the TV, her lips moving in prayer as she cries with Jackie. They could be sisters, conjoined in their loss.

“The eternal flame,” Mum murmurs. “That was Jackie's idea. She's protecting his memory perpetually.” That's what Mum had given Dad: “perpetual care.” Which meant that St. John's Cemetery would keep the grass mowed for as long as the earth grew grass.

“It means forever,” Mum adds, unnecessarily, since the word
perpetual
appears in all the prayers and half the hymns we've memorized since we were old enough to talk. “That flame will never, never be allowed to die, girls. That's how much she loved him.”

Mum's empathy for Jackie swells her eyes, but beneath her sadness lies a profound relief, for she's harboring a secret she'll reveal only after we've returned safely from our trip. For two weeks now, her nighttimes have been plagued by the same vivid, persistent dream: three small, gaping holes in a graveyard.

What does this mean?

Dad's PEI lore had brimmed with ghosts and superstition, the usual ladies in gauzy nightgowns passing through the walls of snow-slumped farmhouses. Mum, too, had loved these stories and believed them wholly. And why not? One of Dad's nieces read auras and tea leaves, and Mum's eerie knack for attracting the devotion of animals had always struck us as a bequest from the Other Side. Plus, we were Catholic. If you believed that St. Juan Diego found fresh roses growing in winter, that St. Patrick told the snakes to leave Ireland
and they did,
that your nervous uncle could turn a wafer of unleavened bread into the literal body of Christ, then you were desperate well equipped for other kinds of magical thinking.

Mum had dreamed Dad's death and look what happened. Now, days before taking to the highways in Aunt Rose's car, the haunting specter of those small open graves.

Front seat: the adults.

Back seat: Monnie, Cathy, Betty. One, two, three.

Do the math.

But over the weekend of November 22, the math suddenly adds up to a liberating, forehead-mopping relief.

One: the president.

Two: the killer.

Three: a Dallas police officer caught in the crossfire.

Awful about the president. Awful beyond telling.
We can't believe it, how can we go on?
But not as awful as the thing she thought God had in mind.

 

I'd heard only one other widow story by the time the president died, a story that began with a cousin of Mum's languishing with cancer. “C,” people called it, fearing to bring the dreaded word into the house. They whispered its name as if it had ears, covered their mouths as if it had eyes.
The doctors opened him up, took one look, and closed him back up again.
This happened all the time, on both sides of the river, a secret sin on the soul of our valley, a grisly byproduct of the Oxford's bounty. Our viscous air and the mill below it; our fish-killed river and the mill above it: This was the great unmentionable, even when its eerie colors showed you the possibility of your own death. Because what your life received in return was worth the price.